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Late last year, I blogged about a popular Joomla component that contained hidden advertising links.

Since then more people have contacted us about other extensions that employ the same dirty trick.

Which Extensions Have Been Found With Hidden Links?

• Joomap and XMap: see our previous post.
• Joomlart's Transmenu: click to see how many sites are hiding links they don't know about.
• Smoothgallery: contains three hidden links, only one to the developer.
• Artio SEF: contained hidden links to European hotels and other unrelated sites.
  
• AddThis Social Bookmarking: hidden link recently removed after complaints.
  
• Fireboard searchbot: it places an ad for the developer as the first result in all searches made on your site. There is no disclosure but there a small option inside the mambot to turn if off.

Why Is Hidden Advertising a Problem?

1. From a moral perspective, you have the right to know who or what is linking from your site.
2. Technically you'll be in violation of Google's guidelines.
   
   Whether or not sites will be penalized is a question thats difficult to determine, but the violation is clear:
   
   "If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?"
   http://www.go...nswer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
   

Why Do Developers Do It?

Why do they create the links? Some extensions such as Joomlart's TransMenu have produced over 1.6 million links back to the developer. I doubt if 1% of those site owners realize they are providing those links.

Why do they hide it? Developers feel that if they put the link in a visible place, people would edit it out of the code and they wouldn't get their "reward". One developer actually spells this out in his code:

"Visitors don't see it, but search engines do. We appreciate backlinks, please consider this your thank you."

What is the Solution?

I'd like to propose a couple of possible answers:

1. Hidden advertising be added to the list of Extension Directory rules. Components with hidden links would be subject to the same three step penalty process as others who break those rules. Rather than immediately penalizing any of the extensions above, the developers could be given a month to come into compliance.




2. Longer term, perhaps we could include Joomla Credits in the Joomla core with a link to it from the Main Menu. People who don't want it displayed can simply unpublish the menu link. This would make it easy for everyone to understand who they are linking to. It would also mean that Joomla developers could give away their products and perhaps get even more links than they do now, without needing to be deceptive.

Comments (13)

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written by Brian Teeman, January 16, 2008

Couldnt agree with you more on this one. Just had an embarrassing situation with a government web site that had several of these hidden adverts on their site.

I've also started to grep for naughty words in code comments as some of them are being output as well

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written by Zorro, January 16, 2008

Excellent article, and three cheers to your two proposals which are very well thought-out.

Kind regards,
Zorro

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written by Cory Webb, January 16, 2008

That's pretty shady. I like your solutions, but who is going to police that? I think it is up to high-profile people in the community to keep people informed of this sort of activity. Thanks for sharing.

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written by Steve Burge, January 16, 2008

Hi Cory

I agree .. its up to us to pick up on these problems and report them. I'd recommend that the current Extensions site policy continue ... someone reports a problem and its investigated. The Extensions crew can find these links in just a couple of minutes once they know where to look.

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written by trichnosis, January 16, 2008

I can understand people who writes codes for J!. Everybody wants to make profit from their codes but the way of making profit is shame. hidden ads

Thanks for your great article about this

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written by Iain Mace, January 17, 2008

Hi Steve,
On the JoomArt side of things, the Transmenu that ships with the commercial templates does not appear to be affected.

Thanks for the info on the other components.
Iain

I don't agree with you
written by Federico, January 18, 2008

I don't see anything scandalous.

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written by Steve Burge, January 18, 2008

Hi Federico

Scandalous ... no.
Worth fixing ... yes.

DocMartin
written by Martin Williams, January 24, 2008

Came across your info re hidden advertising in joomap by chance - I was looking for info on google guidelines and advertising (after being asked if I'd accept some ads).
Found my joomap indeed creating such dodgy links; now turned off - Thanks.
From joomap article, I moved on to this. Intriguing, and sad state of affairs within Joomla community I think.
Some involved in open source may figure something scandalous here; esp if valid websites take hits.
Voluntary controls would seem best, but not sure about these - just seen ko-ca dot com [taking care not to make link by accident!] has PR 7, so perhaps the blaggards find it successful, and others may be tempted to give it a go. Maybe up to Joomla folk, who have moved to reduce commercial components; extensions w sneaky links would seem a fair target too.
And yes, a fair link as thanks would seem valid.
Hadn't known of credits component; just downloading.

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written by Juhani, January 27, 2008

At the end hiding links will turn against the developer since it clearly violates Google's guidelines. If spiders don't find the hidden links the users surely will... Developers that do this kind of "link building" take a huge risk of getting their site banned from Google.

Component users should still also watch their HTML since Google could also give penalty to the site that hides the link.

If you don't like it...
written by Jim, February 04, 2008

..then just don't use it! I can see Alledia uses Joomap

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written by Steve Burge, February 04, 2008

Hi Jim

1) We do indeed use it, with the hidden link turned off. Its a great product - it just needed this one flaw fixing.

2) People need to know if they have a component installed that can harm their rankings. If they chose to keep it, thats up to them, but something like this shouldn't be hidden from them.

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written by Xmap, April 06, 2008

Hi, Xmap does not include hidden links since a long time ago!

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